Last night’s film: Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton for the 38th time because it’s one of the best movies ever made: a microscopic collision between existential anxiety and end-game capitalism, a masterclass in dialogue, and the first three minutes might be my favorite opening scene in cinema—a perfect juxtaposition of cosmic horror soundtracking the ultramundane.
And I’m suddenly consumed with the overwhelming sensation that I’m covered with some sort of film. And it’s in my hair, my face. It’s like a glaze, like a coating. At first I thought, my God, I know what this is, this is some sort of amniotic, embryonic fluid. I’m drenched in afterbirth. I’ve bridged the chrysalis. I’ve been reborn. But then the traffic, this stampede, the cars , the trucks, the horns, the screaming and I’m thinking, no no no, reset, this is not rebirth. This is some kind of giddy illusion of renewal that happens in the final moment before death.
The Joshua tree was named by Mormons in the 1850s, who thought they saw their prophet pointing to the promised land. I wonder what it would feel like to see prophets and omens in the landscape. “God is not interested in our theology but only in our silence,” writes Cormac McCarthy in The Passenger, which restates Psalm 46:10 from a human point of view: “Be still and know that I am God.”
Stillness has been in short supply these days, and I’m trying to puzzle out the relationship between peace and growth. Does growth require pain? Or at least some degree of tension? I have yet to hear someone say their life was bursting with love and tranquility and they couldn’t count all the money in the bank and that’s when they decided to get spiritualized.
Virga is the name for precipitation that does not reach the ground. It hangs across the desert like a torn curtain. When rain does fall, the unique scent of a desert storm comes from the oil released by the creosote bush, and this odor has a scientific name, petrichor, derived from pétros, the Greek word for stone, and ichor, the mythic golden blood of the gods. In Mexico, the creosote bush is called gobernadora or “the governess” because its root system crowds out nearby plants. This is why they appear so evenly spaced apart. There’s a creosote known as “King Clone” in the Mojave Desert that is 11,700 years old. The Mojave is a rain shadow desert because it is surrounded by mountains that absorb the damp winds from the Pacific and dry the air on the leeward slopes.
A few minutes after midnight in the Mojave desert, a preacher appears on a dead radio channel: “The devil’s job is to deceive you. The devil’s job is to make you think that God can’t do nothin’ for you, that God don’t care about you.”
This preacher is the centerpiece of Vegas Dust, a 77-minute sequence of grainy loops and phantom Americana built for a late-night drive. Neon gives way to starlight. Voices worry about their souls on the AM dial. A caller from Twentynine Palms says the universe might not even exist, that maybe the sun is hanging from a tree somewhere. But you can never see further than your headlights.
Vegas Dust is now available on Bandcamp, and maybe someday I’ll figure out how to put it on Spotify or wherever. (And for you bargain-hunters: three of the tracks are twenty minutes long. Because with Atlas Minor, your dollar goes further.)
Today the air temperature in Vegas reached 100 degrees for the first time this year. Meanwhile, 28 miles away, C. and I found a 68-degree breeze and a few patches of snow at 8,600 feet in the Spring Mountains.
But I did not enjoy the mountaintop. Each year I feel a little more vertiginous. A little more overwhelmed by the belly-flop sensation of tumbling from a great height. Perhaps this is another fun side-effect of becoming more familiar with mortality. Or maybe I’m just a ground-dwelling creature who prefers the pavement and neon and dunes.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve dog-eared and highlighted so many pages in a novel. The New House by David Leo Rice has become an all-time favorite—an eerie, challenging, and delirious book that has burrowed into my thoughts like a seminal dream. It reads like the murk of limbic memory. And in parts, it reads like prophecy.
When a child wonders whether he is at the Trader Joe’s or a Trader Joe’s, it becomes “a question deep enough to knock on the locked doors of the sacred.” From here, the doors keep opening, one after the next, until they’re swinging like a mad cartoon, corkscrewing down into the muck of ambiguity, where things are one way yet possibly also the other way, and these endless forks generate a feedback loop of the paralyzing and the possible that feels like invention itself.
This is a fable about the headfuck of creation, and I want to press it into the hands of every artist, writer, and seeker I know.
Art-making intertwines with myth-making as we follow “an artist whose singularity will come close to justifying the entire American experiment.” He meets an enigmatic old woman who says, “When you show people images they’ve never seen before, something dead inside them comes back to life.” And this book teems with life as Rice conjures a world of shapeshifting bullies, talking drops of blood, and two villains known only as “the couple from another town”—all moving through a night “so deep it serves as a sort of anesthesia.” Likewise, Rice’s prose generates a hypnotic effect that lowers the defenses until moments of terror arrive with little more than a single phrase, like the mad butcher whose voice “is like that of a pig who’s been trained by some lonely pervert farmer to speak.”
Ancient mysticism collides with freaky Americana in a glorious mess through which Rice carves a precision-grade line between the liberating and the horrifying—two conditions that describe any creative endeavor, including faith. There’s a moment when the hero fumbles his way to a definition of art as “the brute dragging of heavy objects from the world in which they already exist into the world in which strangers, ignorant of their origins, can admire them in comfort.” Because when it comes down to it, as one character observes, most of us “want to touch the weird without fearing that the weird will touch them back.”
Last night I covered my office with maps. I stayed up late and stitched together my favorite pieces of the Mojave: the Imperial Dunes and the Devil’s Playground, Last Chance Mountain and the Confusion Range. At dawn, I stepped back to admire my handiwork and discovered I’d turned into my father. Shortly before he died, he wallpapered a small room in New Orleans with maps of the bayou, marking the places he liked to fish: Jesuit Bend. Port Sulphur. Lost Lake.
For the first time in decades, I remembered the fat sheath of maps in my grandfather’s fishing boat, where I would marvel at the mythic language of Michigan’s lakes: Thunder Bay. Jackfish Channel. Knife River Harbor. I did not expect these maps of Death Valley and Joshua Tree to draw me into the past, to join me with my father and grandfather’s need to comprehend where they were. But it felt good to say hello to these memories, my ghosts. My grandfather. My father. And me, the end of the line. They had the water. I have the desert.
Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country. Twenty years ago, the desert appeared through my windshield, and it felt like driving into a cartoon: a yellow rectangle beneath a block of electric blue. To my Midwestern mind, accustomed to damp fields and pale skies, the Mojave was another planet. Although I was only twenty-five years old and not yet thinking about god or regret or reinvention, I heard a spiritual hum beneath the silence of the mountains. Tribes of dune buggies crawled across the dunes, and I thought I saw the future. I’m going to live here someday, I said.
Instead, life led me through cities, snow, and swamp—New York, Helsinki, New Orleans—and it took my parents and delivered terrible scenes. A pandemic. Berserkers in the Capitol. Mass shootings like the weather report. Screens that scrambled my sense of space, time, and self. And all the while, I fantasized about the desert as a refuge where I might heal my battered brain and really get to work.
I’m finally here, perched on the southwest edge of Vegas. But I’m older now and fighting to resist the exhaustion of the twenty-first century, or worse yet, resignation. My view of the desert has changed too. The future is still here, but I also see the past. I think about all those ancient ascetics who wandered across the sand in search of the sacred, and I wonder if I can do the same.
I live in Las Vegas, but I do not gamble. When I first visited the Strip twenty years ago, I tried my luck at blackjack. Took out $100 in mad money. Lost $85 immediately. Back then, they had $3 tables with human dealers rather than machines, and a kind woman from Monterey showed me how to split and double down. I kept winning and let it ride, telling myself it was just fifteen bucks. Night became day, but I had no concept of time until I realized I’d smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. I was up nearly $800.
Five years later, I drove through Vegas again. I’m great at blackjack, I thought. I should play. Vegas took it all back and then some. This city will get its money, no matter how long it takes.
So I do not gamble. Except for one longstanding wager.
Seven years ago, C. and I debated how the world would end. We’ll all be killed by a disease, she said. All those chemicals, long-haul flights, and antibiotics are going to add up to something bad. I thought it would be the singularity, mostly because I was reading a lot of sci-fi. Our conversation felt theoretical at the time, this debate over whether we’d perish while holding hands on a cot beneath the harsh lights of a stadium transformed into a quarantine zone, or if we’d be running through the streets for our lives before getting laser-blasted by a renegade sex robot.
During the peak of the pandemic, there was a constant hum from C., faint but unmistakable. It said I told you so. But I’m gaining serious ground this year. I don’t think the Rise of the ChatBots will destroy us right away. Torching the livelihoods of millions so a few billionaires can line their pockets is the next logical step. But you never know what the side effects of any new technology will be. If someone told me fifteen years ago that Facebook and Twitter would transform America into a basketcase, I doubt I would have listened. I don’t know if anyone could connect the dots between sharing a picture of your lunch and attempting to hang the vice president. Social media seemed benign in its early years. AI feels sinister after two months.
So our wager continues, and it will be the biggest jackpot of all: one of us gets to look into the other’s eyes during our final moments and know we were right.
The wind is fierce in the San Gorgonio Pass, the narrow strip between the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains where there’s a field of 1,224 wind turbines. On Interstate 10, a gust knocked over a truck and its container blocked the westbound lanes. C. and I thought about the wind a lot as we toured Desert X, an exhibition of large-scale installations scattered around the margins of Palm Springs. We bowed our heads into 40-mile-per-hour gusts while we visited a chain-link maze and a headless, armless woman on a bucking horse.
Why does the wind leave us feeling so exhausted and harassed? I pondered this while we trudged into another howling gust to view an eerie ballet of mechanical bulls replaced by steel plates. C. said the wind tires us out because we use our muscles to brace against it. But I think the effects are more profound than struggling to remain upright, almost metaphysical, as if my life force is being blown away. C. stopped and looked at me, her hair whipping around her face. “So you think the wind is blowing away your ch’i?” Yes. It’s all over the Coachella Valley now.
No. 1225 Chainlink by Rana BegumSearching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium) by Mario García TorresNamak Nazar by Hylozoic/Desires
Just off 29 Palms Highway, a loudspeaker broadcasted a frantic chant followed by ritualistic drums. As we approached, a soothing voice unfurled a theory about a grain of salt that can heal our climate. It’s a fine rare thing to encounter a conspiracy aimed in a positive direction rather than the usual apocalyptic doom.
But the most compelling piece was an incidental moment rather than any piece of art, which is often the case. As we walked alongside the eastbound lanes of Interstate 10 to see a sculptural arrangement of shipping containers, we passed a billboard for Tattoo Mark’s Estate Sales. A 20-foot-tall man in a ball cap grimaced above the speeding traffic as if struggling to arrange his face to meet the chipper demands of advertising while maintaining the solemnity his trade requires.
Sleeping Figure by Matt Johnson
The tangled formation of shipping containers was a beautiful feat of scale and balance, although I wish it wasn’t arranged like a reclining person. The artist even drew a face. I’d rather see a mystery and imagine the kind of force that could produce such an uneasy arrangement. Perhaps a terrible wind. As I stood beneath the shadow of a cantilevered Chinese shipping container, I thought about the truck flipped over on the interstate. But mostly, I thought about Tattoo Mark moving through the homes of the dead.
A Scribble, an Exploded Rocket, and an Oyster Omelet
Woke up the other day and watched a billionaire’s rocket explode. Then C. and I ate breakfast at a Taiwanese deli on Rainbow Road: a bowl of soy milk, intensely fried bread, and an oyster omelet. We wandered into a hip zone of Vegas where a 1960s motel has been retrofitted into a breeding ground for nitro coldbrew, artisanal photography, chalkboard mantras, and shade-grown candles. Every surface gleamed with a gently neutered Art Deco aesthetic that belongs to no geography or point of view beyond lifestyle pieces that use phrases like “digital nomad”—a style so frictionless and familiar it feels almost narcotic.
Bought a small new notebook to carry around the desert, and it’s a pleasant shade of green. Whenever I buy a new notebook, the first thing I do is make an ugly scrawl to prevent myself from ever mistaking it for something precious.
In Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami contemplates why his novels sold particularly well during times of sudden upheaval: Russia and Eastern Europe as communism collapsed, Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He writes:
In any age, when something major occurs and there’s a shift in social reality, there’s a related yearning for a shift in the reality of stories as well. Stories can exist as metaphors for reality, and people need to internalize new stories (and new systems of metaphor) in order to cope with an unfolding new reality. By successfully connecting these two systems, the system of actual society and the metaphoric systems . . . people are able to accept an uncertain reality and maintain their sanity. I get the sense that the reality in the stories I provide in my fiction just happens to function globally as a kind of cogwheel that makes that adjustment possible.
This is a sound case for fiction when things get weird, particularly stories that shrug off the familiar and engage with the surreal. “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,” said André Breton a century ago. “Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial or not at all.” Could this sensibility also insert itself into our cafes, motels, parking garages, and department stores?
The Nightly News II is an evolution of The Nightly News, a participatory installation that invites visitors to delve into the scenes of anxiety, desire, and possibility that fill our heads each night. Anchored by an ever-expanding video, this project immerses visitors in the realm of the subconscious while a mysterious pair of hands sifts through handwritten fragments from the community—much like the act of recalling a dream often falls apart as we fumble for details just beyond the reach of language and thought. Only the essence remains. We run, we search, and we commune with our ghosts. We cannot speak, our teeth fall out, and we are strangers in a strange land.
Currently on view at the MSU Broad Art Museum through May 28, 2023, The Nightly News II is devoted to the scenes delivered by forces beyond our control. And as we encounter the dreams of others, we are reminded of the interconnectedness of our experiences and the strange beauty that lies beneath our waking minds.
Created with Candy Chang, and the soundtrack is from an album I’m putting together called Vegas Dust.
MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan. Video installation and mixed media. Curated by Dalina Perdomo Alvarez. Organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in collaboration with Michigan State University’s International Studies and Programs. Special thanks to Anjam Chaudhary. Photos by Eat Pomegranate Photography.
In this Terrible Year of 2023 when algorithms are chewing through the scenery, I thought I’d been decent at catching AI-generated vapor from my students. The incursions have been fewer than expected—and painfully obvious. Perhaps this is because I continually nudge my students to connect everything we read to their personal experiences. I want them to rant, revelate, and set the course material on fire if need be. Because the last thing anyone needs to write—or read—is another summary of the Bauhaus or ode to Constructivism. I take the work we do together seriously, aiming for conversation rather than evaluation until we find ourselves asking questions we cannot yet answer.
But the other day I was sleepy and, after a long day of grading, I thought I was reading an especially uninspired essay about Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and I responded with a few hundred words of feedback and questions. Then it hit me. With gritted teeth, I pasted the essay into a text box, and yep, three of the algorithms that check the other algorithms delivered a 92% result.
And it was about the goddamned work of art in the goddamned age of mechanical reproduction, of all things. Perhaps I should just enjoy the beautiful irony here, but the image of myself spending my brief time on this planet thoughtfully reading and responding to the patterns of an algorithm fills me with a horror that edges toward the existential. And for some reason, I also feel a little dirty.
Twenty-six inches of rain fell in Fort Lauderdale yesterday, and they’re calling it a once-in-a-thousand-year flood. At this point, it feels like we’re all hundreds of thousands of years old. Meanwhile in the Mojave desert, we’re hoping to prevent a “dead pool,” a grim term for the moment Lake Meade drops so low the Hoover Dam can no longer function, which would knock out portions of the electrical grid and eliminate freshwater to a fair chunk of the southwest. The federal government is calling for water reductions, nineteen bills are pending in Nevada, and the water wars are coming.
C. and I wandered further into the desert last weekend. As we marveled at the tower of rock that loomed before us, she told me we were looking at the “Bonanza King Formation,” a lovely bit of cadence that sounds like a doomed band from the 1970s. Dead crustaceans create limestone, she said, and this part of the desert was unique because ancient slabs of limestone live on top of younger rocks due to collisions between the continental plates. We scrabbled among red and yellow boulders, and I happily listened while she reminisced about the Cambrian period when the Pacific coastline was somewhere in Utah.
As we picked our way along a ridge, I tried to imagine myself as an amateur geologist, someone for whom this static landscape was filled with slow-motion violence and flux. Could I ever become interested in rocks, or must it take catastrophic weather to get my attention? These days it might be more necessary than ever to develop an eye for the timeless.
C.’s flight home from the Middle West was delayed due to some tornadoes that were tearing up Missouri, so I had time to kill at the Las Vegas airport, where it feels like being returned to a pleasant memory of 1987: corridors of neon, spaceship aluminum, slot machines, and burgundy carpet.
Eager tourists queued up to photograph themselves with the new Vegas slogan. A few years ago, Vegas decided to shake off the sleazy implications of What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. So they hired an advertising agency to drain the English language of any meaning until it became a cheap koan that belongs anywhere: What happens here, only happens here. I pondered this phrase until it became terrifyingly existential.
A tattered man settled into the bench next to me and surrounded himself with a fortress of plastic bags and the weather of the street. He launched into a litany of muttered theories about the government and a man named Bobby. I would have given him a dollar or two, but I never seem to have any cash these days. It might be worth carrying some for these moments. Because I’m goddamned lucky. A few tweaks in the timeline could have left me in his seat, haunted and alone. Hell, it could still happen. Two airport cops eyed the man for a while, then kept walking.
Time stretched into a crawl while my neighbor’s muttering downshifted into a snore. Eventually, the big screen said C.’s flight had landed, and I scanned the faces that passed by, each defined by the simple fact of not belonging to her. When I finally spotted her at the other end of the terminal, she gave a little wave, and time resumed again.
We live in the far southwestern corner of Las Vegas, and it’s a strange nexus between the extremes of nature and civilization. Four miles to the west, there is no cell service, and the temperature begins to drop as the mountains rise. Six miles to the east, there’s, well, Vegas: manic neon, skyscraper-sized screens, and the fever dream of end-game capitalism buffed and polished to a synthetic sheen.
The first three months of 2023 have been the coldest in Las Vegas in over fifty years. But yesterday was pleasant, so C. and I headed into the mountains. You can tell a lot about a relationship by the way couples hike. A sunburnt man raced ahead, screaming at his partner to hurry up, while others ambled and murmured, lost in their private worlds. C. and I just tend to get lost. We’ll climb onto a boulder, scan for trail markers or cairns, and realize we’ve wandered into god only knows. Straying from the prescribed path makes me antsy, but the whole point of dealing with nature might be learning to let go of the little maps and well-worn paths in my head.
The desert silence baffles my Midwestern mind. No birds chirping, no insects buzzing, not even the faint hum that I associate with humidity. It feels like I’m on a movie set, a manufactured world, and sometimes my hand reaches for a boulder, expecting it to be made of papier-mâché. This fleeting confusion between the genuine and the artificial captures my sense of being alive these days.
The winter gloom has receded from Vegas, leaving behind electric blue skies punctuated by a few Super Mario clouds. I’ve been working on touching my toes because I worry I’m getting creaky. Last week, I could barely reach my knees, but now I can almost brush my shins. I don’t want to become one of those grey men who struggle to put on their socks or sigh when they drop a pen, knowing it will be a significant event to retrieve it. I need to find a way to do the same with my brain because the future is coming fast and weird, and I’ll need a limber disposition to survive it.
“Soon we will find ourselves living inside the hallucinations of non-human intelligence,” said some big thinkers in The New York Times. It’s already made an incursion into my classroom. A student wrote, “I cannot describe the last advertisement to influence my behavior because I am a machine-learning model and I experience the world differently than human beings.” How do you respond to this type of thing? That night I stared at the ceiling, worrying about a world where writing becomes so cheap that reading is pointless and frightened by the havoc that will occur when these systems inevitably converge with the personal data harvested from us over the years. Technology might have peaked with magnetic tape: mix tapes and movies on VHS—perhaps that’s all we ever needed.
A delightful sense of slippage occurs when you can’t decide if something is brilliant or awful, which is how I felt the first time I heard Deux, a French synthwave duo who recorded a handful of tracks in the early 1980s before disappearing. In a dimension light years away from whatever their synthesizers are doing, Cati Tête and Gérard Pelletier mumble-sing to each other about how it might be time to dance, and they sound effortlessly cool, an effect enhanced by the photograph on the cover of Golden Dreams. The two of them look so young and hopeful and French, smoking in a way that makes me miss cigarettes terribly. There’s a tenderness to this snapshot: forty years have passed, and Pelletier passed away in 2013. Thanks to the indispensable Minimal Wave label, their music has earwormed into my day-to-day life. In addition to “Golden Dreams,” I highly recommend the android grind of “Lassitude,” the spiky bop of “Game and Performance,” and the terrifyingly catchy “Decadence”.
At what point does a walk become a hike? C. and I often ponder this when we find ourselves on a dirt path or crossing a parking lot. We’ve decided it requires a bit of an incline and enough time to demand a granola bar.
We have interesting discussions when we wander into nature. If dehydration became life-threatening, would you rather drink your own urine or someone else’s? The car was still in sight when this question came up. Or if starvation was on the table, would you rather eat your own finger or a stranger’s? This inspired some lively debate. On the one hand, we know where we’ve been and what we’re made of, but God only knows the ingredients of a stranger. Then again, consuming oneself has an ouroboros quality that feels demonic.
A few years ago, our friends dragged us on a hike through a New Hampshire forest, and they moved with terrifying urgency. We sat down at the first scenic viewpoint and let them continue crashing through the trees so they could exorcise their ghosts and satisfy whatever hunger was pushing them onwards.
But now that we’re in the desert, we want to engage with the scenery beyond the windshield. So we drove ten minutes to Red Rock Canyon and suddenly we found ourselves hiking. We leapt across creeks, shimmied up ledges, and at one point, we clung to the sheer face of an action-movie boulder over a canyon that plunged into the center of the earth. I can’t believe the government allows its citizens to risk their lives like this.
Vista of Vegas from the Calico Tanks
At first, I hated everything about it, this scrabbling across the rocks like an animal. Everyone else wore grippy shoes and backpacks stuffed with equipment I couldn’t even guess at, and as I scrambled after C., who was weirdly talented at hopping from rock to rock, I was convinced I was about to become a local news item. When we finally reached the summit, we were rewarded with a view of Vegas that reinforced my theory that this city is a mirage. Then I needed to sit down as a bout of vertigo took hold.
On the way back down, I moved more confidently. That sheer drop into the center of the earth was actually only four or five feet, and I felt surprisingly good and accomplished. Like I’d satisfied a hunger I never knew I had.
Heavy skies here in Vegas, and the wind has been ferocious. I had no idea there was so much weather in the desert. By now, I thought I’d be begging for a cloud.
“I can’t wait for summer,” I said, and the lady cutting my hair shushed me as if I were summoning a demon. She gave me a long talk about hydration while she snipped away. Not just plenty of water, she said, but also salads and cucumbers, and you should never go outside in daylight. By the time she finished, I was convinced a cup of coffee in July would send me to the emergency room.
“I love the summer,” said the man next to me. “Especially the nights.” “Because it gets cooler?” “Because it’s hot and dark.”
Among all U.S. states, church attendance is lowest in Nevada. But I think this is where I’ll really learn to pray. The other day C. and I went to a zen temple behind a strip mall for a beginner’s meditation session. We removed our shoes and stepped inside to find a dozen bald elderly people in red robes chanting in Burmese. We edged backward out of the room and quietly closed the door.
The wind is still howling, but the cold is finally gone. Forty-mile-per-hour gusts out of the southwest spill over the Spring Mountains after soaking California with another atmospheric river and a collapsed bank.
Saturday night in Death Valley was wild. Ninety-mile-per-hour curves and a thirty-degree temperature shift as C. and I dropped out of the Spring Mountains, hooked a left at the opera house, and motored toward Zabriskie Point, where the wind tore us to pieces. Fifty-mile-per-hour gusts blew the lifeforce from our bodies as we surveyed the dramatic rocks of Red Cathedral and teetered back to the car.
We looped around for fifty miles, hunting for some famous sand dunes, but we couldn’t find the damned things. But Death Valley is a place where ten thousand acres of scenery can easily go missing. The area spans over three million acres, and it is a zone that can only be understood by extreme measurements: elevation, wind speed, precipitation, and temperature.
Maybe we’ll find the dunes next time, we said as we dropped down into Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. Next time. Maybe even next weekend because it’s only eighty miles from our place. Later that night, a friend in New Orleans called while I waited in a Vegas parking lot for some Singapore mei fun.
“What’s in Death Valley?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said. “And everything.”
